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Compare FeedBurner Stats With Feed Compare

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Blog Perfume has announced the release of a new tool they call Feed Compare. Feed Compare is an online tool that allows you to easily compare your FeedBurner Subscriber numbers to others. The online tool has four text fields allowing you to compare the stats between four different Feeds at a time. FeedCompare uses graphs from amCharts.com to plot out the number of RSS subscribers over time. You can view your RSS comparison in 5 different views, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months and 24 months. As a test, I compared my personal site with Performancing.com and although my line graph was embarrassing, it was interesting to see the steady increase in subscribers for Performancing.com.

Here is the link which shows you the comparison between the two sites.

AdSense In A Feed Near You

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FeedBurner, who was purchased by Google back on May 23rd, 2007 for a whopping $100 million dollars announced on May 30th that starting this week, they will be rolling out AdSense feeds for a small group of publishers. This small publishing group will act as beta testers as FeedBurner plans a full launch of the service.
According to FeedBurner,

publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory. That means you get the best of both worlds: a dedicated Google sales force that knows how and why to sell onto your content, with the added revenue that full back-fill coverage provides. And with AdSense, you’ll know that your back-filled ads are using the strongest contextual ad engine, ensuring the most relevant and profitable ads are delivered to your subscribers. And yes, ads are also sold via Google’s AdWords program.

For those of you who are not yet placing ads in your feeds but would like to do so, be sure to read the requirements to join the AdSense program.

If you would like to use AdSense for your feeds, you’ll first need to sign up for AdSense if you haven’t already. Then, set up your AdSense channels for placement targeting. This will allow advertisers to target your syndicated content specifically. According to FeedBurner, you will be able to remain in control of the campaigns that are targeted at your feed by using the Ad Review Center.

Considering there are over 934,797 publishers who have created 1,657,885 feeds with 229,542 of those being podcast and videocast feeds, there are quite a few people in the mix who are in line to make money through AdSense within their Feed.

I’m thanking my lucky stars right now that this is a feature they have provided to their end users which is a much better solution than to slap ads on every single Feed that has been created through their service. If you are looking to monetize your RSS feed, definitely keep an eye out on FeedBurner.

Defragmenting The Conversation

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During the past couple of weeks, there have been a number of articles discussing the aspect of comment fragmentation. The problem being described is that, instead of commenting on the blog where the blog post resides, people are conversing on their favorite social platforms such as Twitter or FriendFeed. This has lead to an increasing problem which doesn’t appear to be getting better any time soon.

In my own experience, I’ve always left a comment on the actual blog post rather than on a social web service. I have a Twitter account, but 140 characters is usually not enough for me when I leave a comment. However, how many times have to visited the actual blog post, only to go back to Reddit or Digg or some other service and discuss what you just read?

Third Party commenting services such as Disqus or IntenseDebate plan on implementing features which will pull comments made on specific services and place them back on the blog. But until that happens, there is going to be bits and pieces of the overall conversation here, there and everywhere.

When I presented this topic within the Performancing Hive Forums, I received a number of interesting responses. They ranged from, could care less about community building as they have developed their sites around search traffic acquisition to being happy that anyone would leave a comment on their blog at all. Someone also mentioned the fact that they appeared on the front page of Reddit. The article on Reddit received 180+ comments while the blog only received 53. Whats interesting is that, you have to actually click through a link on Reddit and visit the actual page. After doing so, people are going back to Reddit to leave their comment.

I think Steven Hodson of WinExtra.com hit the nail on the head when he proposed that comment fragmentation was not the bloggers fault. As bloggers, we can not control where the conversation takes place. Readers will decide when and where they will participate in the conversation.

I now propose a few questions to the Performancing audience. First, do you believe that conversation fragmentation is an issue? Secondly, are you happy with the fact that your articles are being discussed at all, wherever that might be?

What Are You ABOUT

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Since I’ve started to blog on serious level, I’ve come to find out that the most important page on my blog was the About page. I’ve spent quite a bit of time browsing the web and I’ve noticed myself looking for the About page quite often as the sites purpose was not immediately defined. I’ve been thankful to those who have a page set aside to describe what their site is all about. For those that don’t have an about page, you are truly doing yourself and your audience a dis service.

Tips on writing a good about page:

  1. First, make sure the link to your About page is in an expected location. Typically, the majority of sites either place an about link at the top or bottom of the site within the navigation links.
  2. In the first paragraph, be clear, concise and to the point in a paragraph or less as to what your blog is all about.
  3. The about page is a nice place to present an image of yourself to let people know you are a human being.
  4. For personal blogs, you can add profile information such as name, occupation, and miscellaneous information.
  5. Near the bottom of the about page, I suggest providing readers with a descriptive backlog as to why your blog exists. This includes highlighting the topics you write about, the goals you have in mind, and your inspiration for blogging.
  6. At the end of the about page, give your readers links to other places on the web where they can find your work.

So tell me, have you ever visited a web site that you wanted to know more about but yet, you couldn’t find an about page? Does this frustrate you? Have you taken the time recently to give your About page the love it deserves?